


drifter

by noiselesspatientspider



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Angst, Drabble, Gen, John-centric, Not Season/Series 03 Compliant, POV John Watson, Pining, Post-Reichenbach, can you tell I've taken too many earth science classes, that's a lie you can never take too many earth science classes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-05
Updated: 2014-05-05
Packaged: 2018-01-22 02:47:09
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 492
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1573298
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/noiselesspatientspider/pseuds/noiselesspatientspider
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A series of John-centric post-Reichenbach drabbles.</p>
            </blockquote>





	drifter

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [In the Deep](https://archiveofourown.org/works/587964) by [professorfangirl (lizeckhart)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lizeckhart/pseuds/professorfangirl). 



Sherlock could be lovely, luminous, and strange, just that little bit of sharp around the edges, odd jutting teeth in places teeth shouldn't be. The male anglerfish attaches himself to the female during mating, and is eventually absorbed into her body. She carries him for always.

John tries to imagine himself as a small odd deepsea fish and fails. That's the problem with loyalty, though. It always turns you into someone you don't want to be.

\---

He knows Sherlock had deleted the solar system, but John wonders if he'd also ignored the wild places on Earth: kettlehot jungles and drybone deserts and the endless shifting sea. Sea and space weren't really so different, were they? Both dark and endless and filled with monsters, but mostly emptiness.

That's a monster, too. Nothing is more frightening than nothing.

Come to think of it, John rather hopes Sherlock hadn't gone exploring. The vast fathoms of his mind were dangerous enough.

\---

The ocean floor is covered by thick layers of sea snow, the bodies of monsters and fishes and men fallen apart and turned to manna, drifting in a very very slow descent from the heavens down to the chosen spider crabs that scuttle about in piles of the dead.

John dreams of drowning and is not comforted by the harsh welcome of sunlight on his eyes. Sometimes he thinks he'd like some horrible scavenger to eat his brains. God knows they'd get more use out of them than he does, these days.

\---

Light underwater is a strange thing; sometimes it shines in shafts and beams, and sometimes it fades agonizingly slowly, and sometimes it glows soft and beckoning and you follow it to your doom.

Sherlock called him a conductor of light, and John didn't bother to correct his physics (Sherlock had probably deleted that subject.) The thing about light is that photons never go faster than when in a vacuum. Intervening matter only slows them down.

John remembers “Alone is what I have. Alone protects me” and thinks of photons floundering and sinking, suspended in his thick and useless heart.

\---

Objects dumped into the ocean always return. In 1992, a shipment of 28,800 rubber bath toys fell into the Pacific Ocean. The ducks bobbed across the world, buffeted by wind, bleached by the sun, frozen in ice.

Sherlock washes ashore one day in March, the color of a dead fish and smelling worse. John shoves him into the bath and puts a kettle on. He lets the tap run for too long, listening to the rush of the water. The sea doesn’t falter, no matter what you throw into it.

He clenches his fist, unclenches it, waits for the kettle to click. His heart sloshes in his chest. It doesn’t matter. John is not the ocean, and Sherlock is not a storm. They are only men, and no one will sing songs about them when they are dead.

Anyway, the water is ready.

**Author's Note:**

> I realized this has been sitting on my computer for over a year and a half, so I figured I'd throw it out there.


End file.
